


A good man is hard to find (but don't look here)

by oceansnocturne



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Dad!Hawkeye, Dad!clint, F/M, Hawkeye is a sad badass, Hope I chose the right one, I saw Endgame tonight and got Feelings, Why are there three Clint Bartons, this isn't very good but I had to get some feelings out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-02-10 18:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18665713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansnocturne/pseuds/oceansnocturne
Summary: Feelings about Hawkeye after seeing Endgame. That's it, that's the whole thing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Endgame left me with lots of Hawkeye feelings so this is me trying to get them out. Un-beta'd, only lightly edited, lots of sad Hawkeye. That's it. If you wanna yell about Endgame leave a comment or come find me at my tumblr oceannocture.tumblr.com!

Clint is not a good man. 

He knows this. He’s made his peace with it. Most days, he’s ok with it. 

He started out life as a carnie runaway with an alcoholic father and an older brother who had no problem supplementing his income from other people's’ pockets. It’s not like there was every much hope for him. And yet for some reason Laura decided to marry him anyway, and even though every day he’s grateful he’s been doubting her sanity ever since. There is...a lot of blood on his hands. Before SHIELD he wasn’t exactly on the right side of the law, and even some of the stuff he did for SHIELD left him feeling not so great. Sometimes it’s hard, holding Lila’s hand or touching Cooper’s shoulder or cradling the baby to his chest because...because he’s coated in it, and he tries so hard not to let his life taint the little patch of paradise Laura and the kids have created.

He’s made a lot of stupid decisions in life but he’s been trying to do better. It’s all he can do. For the kids. For Laura. For the family. 

But with everyone gone...he thinks, when he lets himself think about it (which isn’t very often), that if even just one of the kids had been left he could have done it. He could have stayed on the straight and narrow, kept up the farm, dried his tears and kept moving forward. 

But all on his own he finds himself reverting to the one thing he’s good at, his default. Factory reset. 

Clint’s not a good person. But when Thanos snapped his fingers and killed half the world, it wasn’t only the good ones that were left. And a lot of them are worse people than himself, with even more blood on their hands. 

The Avengers are gone. SHIELD is gone. All he had left was his family, and now even that is gone. But if he can do something to help the ones who are left, then maybe he won’t be such a terrible person after all. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As with most things in life, Clint doesn't choose his path. Becoming a murderous ex-superhero vigilante just sort of...happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, look, there's more! Wasn't expecting that. I think there'll be one more chapter after this to wrap it all up.

He leaves Natasha a voicemail before doing anything else. Nothing fancy, just a brief ‘what the hell happened and why wasn’t I involved.’ Standard. 

She returns his call 24 hours later but he doesn’t pick up. He can’t bring himself to even look at the phone as it rings and rings and rings. Instead he waits for her voicemail and listens to it that night as he curls up on Lila’s bed and stares at a photograph of her and Cooper and Nate. Cooper’s looking in the wrong direction and Nate has chocolate or dirt around his mouth. Lila is grinning and holding her training bow. 

Clint is crying. He doesn’t even remember the last time he cried. 

(He thinks it might have been when Barney -)

“Hey, Clint.” Natasha’s voice sounds wrecked. Like she’s been crying too, except that Natasha never cries. “I’m...sorry. I thought you’d be safer with your family. You chose them, after all. I didn’t want to...” there’s a long moment of just breathing before the message cuts off. She _was_ crying. Clint plays the next message. Nat’s brusque now, using her report-delivering voice, but he can still hear it shaking. “Thanos attacked. He was the one behind New York. He’s been collecting the infinity stones for years and he finally got them. Used them to wipe out half of the population in the universe. Fifty...fifty percent. We couldn’t stop him, we...failed. I’m so sorry, Clint. But we could...I could really use you. I don’t...” she trails off again, and right before the message ends she whispers “stay safe.”

He wants to throw the phone across the room and erase all memory of those messages. Natasha Romanoff is _never_ supposed to sound like that, so...so _vulnerable._ If it were any other circumstance he would delete them immediately and hop on the first plane to her location.

Instead, Clint pulls the phone to his chest, along with the photograph, and closes his eyes to sleep. 

-=-

The next morning he drives into town because he has to do _something._ The streets are a mess, covered in wrecked cars and broken glass. He ends up having to park the truck on the side of the road a couple miles out and walk in. 

There’s a whole crowd of people wandering the streets. Most look like how he thinks he must, pale and red eyed and wondering what the hell happened and if someone will fix it. Clint counts as he goes, almost without really noticing, and by the time he reaches the grocery store he’s come to the grim conclusion that Nat was right, and that half of humanity - or of this town, at least - is gone. 

Just gone. No bodies. It’s eerie. 

He’s just starting to wonder if he should try to stick around and help with the cleanup when he gets to the store and finds a group of men with guns. They’ve surrounded the place and aren’t letting anyone through, claiming everything inside for themselves. 

And it’s _bullshit._ Half the world is dead, and instead of coming together they’re already starting to tear each other apart?

Bullshit. 

It reminds him too much of watching Barney dip his hands into the pockets of visitors, people who had already paid to see the show. People who couldn’t spare the extra change. People with families and lives and...

Everything goes quiet, the way it always does right before he makes a particularly tricky shot. The yelling stops. The gunshots go silent. And Hawkeye lays down his bow, grabs his boot knife, and goes to work. 

The thieves are out-of-towners, or else he never would be able to do it. But they have weapons, and the police are nowhere to be seen, so while a few of them run bleeding into the woods several more of them lay bleeding on the pavement. The first bodies of the apocalypse. 

At that point he can’t go back. People are still vulnerable out there, with or without the Avengers, and while he can’t save everyone he can damn well save _some._ If this is permanent then he can at least try to make sure that this brave new world isn’t ruined from the start the way that SHEILD was. Give humanity a fighting chance. 

He goes to Japan. 

At the airport they’re loading passengers into planes: crying, broken halves of families, clinging to strangers, desperate to get back home. Tourists, diplomats, immigrants. Clint slips in between a crying child and a shell-shocked young man and mumbles something about an ex-wife and a step-daughter he hasn’t seen in years, and just like that he’s in. 

He wishes Tasha was with him. She was always good at the undercover stuff. 

Once in Japan he gets to work. The sword is easy enough to come by, and Tasha lets him hack into her network (there’s no way he actually got in that easily on his own) so he can start to identify trouble spots and take care of them. It’s almost like being undercover for SHIELD again. 

Except for the abandoned neighborhoods, the excess of green things growing through everywhere, and the lack of phone calls from Laura to check in and make sure he’s still alive. 

He calls her phone once, just to hear her voicemail. Cooper, only five at the time, yells in the background. Clint listens once, twice, then throws the phone in the air and pins it to the door with an arrow. 

He stays in Japan for almost a year, and this time he does help with actual cleanup. There’s lots of rolling cars and clearing away rubble involved; it reminds him too much of New York but he pushes through the memories because this is how he can help. This is doing good. He doesn’t leave until Natasha tracks down his burner number and leaves a terse voicemail asking if he’s done with his vacation yet. He’s not, so he steals a small private plane, quietly thanks the universe that he doesn’t have to dust the previous owner off of the seat, and takes off for Hong Kong.

From there it’s easy to slip into the crowd and lose himself. He keeps helping with cleanup, but then he comes across a gang with a crate full of orphaned children to be sold and...well. He’s still using a Japanese sword when he slaughters them all, and the kids start whispering about Ronin and wandering swordsmen and that’s that.

Ronin. A samurai without loyalty, a warrior without a family. A wanderer. It’s a little too on the nose, but it’s better than dragging the name of Hawkeye through the mud. He hoped to pass that name on to Lila one day. He can’t...he can’t. He won’t. 

Ronin goes deep underground. There are half as many people in the world but that still leaves millions, and among those millions are thousands of scum extorting, stealing, raping, murdering. So he murders them right back. Fair’s fair. 

It’s killing him, and he knows it. Even before the Apocalypse he still had occasional nightmares about dead bodies and lakes full of blood. Now they come every night, worse and worse. He’s throwing himself into the worst humanity has to offer because _someone_ has to stop it, but he has no illusions about coming out the other side. 

Stitching up a ragged gash along his thigh one night, he idly wonders if he’ll see Laura and the kids again if he bites it. He stops that train of thought with a tug of the string and pushes it as far away as possible. Out of mind, out of sight. Any death wish, no matter how vague, quickly becomes reality in battle. 

After the first year he ends up back in Kyoto, at a tattoo parlor of all places.

Well, he says parlor. It’s more of a hole in the wall that somehow found itself a door. Doesn’t even have a window, just a rough paper sign advertising memorial tattoos for The Vanished. And impulse control was never his strong suit, as his many home improvement projects could attest to, and without Laura, without even Natasha...

It’s the story of his life. Good intentions, but. Don’t want to, but. Should have been there, but. 

He goes in with a vague idea of tallies. People he’s lost, or people he’s killed. Just something to remind himself that it’s officially been a year since the Before became the After. Then he starts flipping through the design book, and talks to the artist, and ‘Ronin’ gets mentioned and four hours later he walks out with the line art for a monstrosity of a sleeve on his arm and strict instructions to come back the next day. The artist originally wanted to draw a warrior but Clint insisted on the skull. He needs it to remind himself of his purpose. _Now I am become Death._ Fixing what Thanos did as best he can. And maybe doing some avenging of his own.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not super happy with how this ended, but I was struggling to come up with anything else and I wanted to get this wrapped up. So here it is, final chapter! This was very therapeutic to write :)  
> Also apologies, Clint's language is super inconsistent, maybe one day I'll fix it :P

Natasha’s looking for him. He knows she is, because it’s what he would do if it were her running rogue and murdering people. It’s what he  _ did. _ Maybe she’s mad at him for not coming back into the dysfunctional arms of whatever’s left of the Avengers; maybe she’s just as upset as she sounds in her voicemails, which are getting increasingly emotional and therefore increasingly terrifying (besides the fact of  _ how the hell is she getting these numbers _ ). If the Black Widow isn’t bothering to hide her emotions - or worse, if she can’t...well then maybe it really is the end of the world. He can’t let it matter though; he’s never going back, no matter how much she asks him to or hints that they  _ need _ him. The thought of looking into the faces of the ones who actually fought, and lost, and abandoned him safely on the farm when he could have  _ helped _ …the thought of seeing Cap’s stupid puppy-dog eyes that make you feel like you failed America, even though you had  _ no damn idea  _ what was going on because apparently you’re not  _ Avenger  _ enough to be kept in the loop -

He might be a little bitter. 

That winter he ditches his latest burner in a dumpster, crushed and actually sparking, before slipping onto a boat bound for Italy. He doesn’t buy a new one when he gets to shore. He’ll miss making use of Tasha’s network - what’s left of it - but contrary to whatever  _ the Avengers  _ think he’s not totally helpless on his own. 

It’s not long before he tracks down the remnants of a Mafia cell in Sicily. His arm is still throbbing from the ink when he goes after them, and one of them gets in a lucky hit because of it.  _ You’ve gone soft, Hawkeye _ he thinks, is exactly what Laura said to him in the hospital, exhausted and glowing, as they placed tiny baby Lila in his arms and he cried. Oh, he  _ cried _ . The best feeling of his life, immediately followed by a swell of  _ oh shit I can’t do this what the hell shit what have I gotten into. _

_ You’ve gone soft, Hawkeye. _

The mafia dies bloody. Clint runs to Prague.

After a few weeks in the city he tracks down another tattoo artist, pauses just long enough to make sure her equipment is clean, and asks for four small tallies burrowed into the folds of the samurai’s robes. One tally for each person he’s lost. The reason he’s doing all of this.

If any of them were still alive to -

The second year passes in a blur of blood and dark nights. The power plants are all understaffed and can only light half of the city at a time. It makes the dark minds of the world bolder, but it also makes his hunting easier. 

Cooper would love seeing all the stars. He used to have a book about constellations and would complain about light pollution, even though they were miles from any city. 

Somewhere in the middle of it all he receives another message from Natasha, a note left in an old safe house, telling him that Tony is a father now and could really use some advice. The  _ we need you _ is implied and he pauses, waiting for the rage to arrive, but it never does. There’s a small surge of anger, but he’s surprised to find that mostly he just feels...tired. 

_ They left me behind,  _ he thinks, prodding the thought forward like a tongue into the bloody gap where a tooth should be. It twinges, and stings, but there’s no overwhelming fury. 

_ Huh. _

Still, he’s not ready to go back, if for no other reason than that the person he’s becoming has no place among other human beings. And he may not be Hulk levels of angry, but he’s still pissed, so rather than think about it he takes it out on another group of pirates attacking fishing vessels for food. 

See? Coping mechanisms. He has them. He’s totally fine.

Totally.

He does not go back to New York.

Around the beginning of Year Three he gets a haircut in Bratislava after some trafficking scum calls him an old man, because apparently his vanity is still alive and well even if no one else is. ( _ Old Man Barton,  _ Laura used to tease him,  _ That’s what the kids will call you. Old Man Barton that lives in the barn and steals from the rich and - _ ) He asks for something to make him look younger, shrugs at the result in the mirror, and pays an extra 20 on the way out. The bill has little brown flecks on the face but no one will care. He’s not the only one fighting in this brave new world.

He goes back to his apartment and Natasha is actually there this time. She’s bleached her hair, which surprises him more than it should, and it’s pure luck that he manages to avoid her. That, and the fact that she clearly isn’t trying to hide. She wants him to see her. No doubt hoping he’ll recognize her and be filled with the sudden desire to talk about his feelings or some crap.

He runs. It seems that’s all he does, these days.

By the time he settles down in Argentina – as much as he can settle down anywhere – people have stopped talking about the Avengers fixing things. As far as he’s concerned it’s for the best. The Avengers never fixed anything in all the time they were together, just stopped things from getting worse. And this is so far beyond them, beyond any of them –

_ I see those guys, those…gods…they need you. _

He shakes his head at the memory and pushes it away with a growl. They didn’t need him against Thanos, and they sure as hell don’t need him now. What is there to do, anyway? There’s no coming back from this. 

He jerks awake one morning with his nightmare still playing behind his eyes: robots, the sky falling, the words  _ you didn’t see that coming?  _ ringing in his ears. 

A blue staff. The worst headache of his life. A body in a suit laid out on a gurney. 

He gets another two tallies in Paraguay and stokes the anger into a little ball inside of him. Maybe Ultron, done right, could have helped against Thanos. Maybe not. Maybe him and his arrows could have helped, or maybe he would have only gotten himself killed or worse, gotten in the way. But he looks at the tallies and reminds himself that the Avengers, even unified, have never been able to save everyone. They Avenge, but they’re not so good at the ‘protecting’ stuff, the preventative measures. If they were then the punk might still be alive, with his sister. Coulson might still be alive. 

The anger remains over the next year, and every time is starts the fade he looks at the tallies and reminds himself of the gods among men who thought they could save the world. Thinks of Thor’s swagger and the way Cap always tried to keep him out of the way in combat when he could have done more to help. Thinks of being on the farm, blissfully unaware there was a battle to be fought until he,  _ his family,  _ reaped the consequences. 

He thinks of those hot dogs, uneaten. The hole at the dead center of his old target. His whole body aches with remembering, but he imagines Tony with a newborn daughter and twists the pain into rage. It’s a cheap trick, but a necessary one. If he’s not angry he’ll collapse; it’s all that’s holding him up now, and he’s man enough to admit it. 

A lot of drug pushers die bloody that year. 

-=-

By the time Tasha finally catches up to him, five years later, he’s exhausted. He’s back in Japan, fighting yakuza, and it’s been  _ five years  _ and the scum  _ still  _ keep crawling out of the woodwork. He’s starting to think his work will never be done, and that he’ll die violently, all alone, having made absolutely no impact on the world. 

(A small part of him is starting to look forward to it, too)

She finds him still covered in blood and he can’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes. She’s smiling, she looks  _ happy  _ to see him, for some reason, even though he’s fallen into the same life she was running away from all those years ago. And she’s wearing the necklace Laura gave her, a birthday present,  _ the closest thing we have to a Barton family crest. Happy birthday, Nat. _

She offers him hope. He’s too scared to take it. 

But she says they need him, and after five years of anger and memories he’s just a little bit desperate to be needed again. Just a little. And he can embrace that because Natasha won’t hold it against him, won’t tell anyone how _Ronin,_ covered in blood, surrounded by bodies, collapsed to the ground at her feet and had to be helped back to his safe house. Won’t tell anyone how they spent the night whispering stories about the ones they lost, taking turns to comfort and be comforted. Natasha Romanoff will never tell another living soul any of his secrets unless he allows it, and he will do the same for her. 

He’s  _ missed  _ this. He forgot what it was like to not be alone. 

It’s not all perfect, of course. Stark is as obnoxious as ever, and Cap’s ‘you’ve failed your country’ look is more unnerving than annoying when it’s directed so intensely inwards. Natasha shrugs when he mentions it to her and says that they all have their guilt complexes that they’re trying to deal with. 

Apparently, ‘dealing with’ it now involves time travel. 

When he volunteers, all Clint can think about is Lila facing her target and Nate demanding ketchup and Cooper dumping dumb mayonnaise on his dumb hotdog (he totally gets it from Laura, no way is Clint taking the fall for  _ that _ ). Blood and bodies hover at the edges of his mind but he pushes them away. He  _ has  _ to see them again.

Unfortunately, in order to do that, he now has to actually  _ talk  _ to his former teammates. 

“So what you’ll need to do,” Tony says, scratching that stupid goatee as he stares at Clint’s right bicep, “is make sure that you’re actually in the past, and not some alternate universe where everyone has buttons for eyes or something.”

“Isn’t that the whole thing with  _ Coraline? _ ” 

Tony’s whole body jerks as he finally looks Clint in the eye. “Huh, didn’t think you’d get that reference, Hawkeye.”

Oh look, turns out he  _ is  _ still angry. 

It feels like it never left, weighing down his gut as he twists his hands into Tony’s shirt and snarls “don’t call me  _ that. _ ”

“What, Haw- okay, okay!” Clint’s grip tightens and Tony chokes a little, eyes wide. “Geez, clearly I’ve touched a nerve. Is there any reason I shouldn’t be calling you by your name, mister archer sir?”

Clint twists his hands one more time before letting go and stepping back. “It’s not my name, Stark. Not anymore. Call me whatever you want.” And he walks away. 

Or, tries to. The door won’t budge. 

“What the hell?” he snarls, whirling to look back at Tony. The billionaire shrugs. 

“Sorry, Robin Hood, but we have a new team policy. Captain’s orders. Actually, Widow’s orders, sorry, force of habit. No more dramatic exits, we gotta talk about our feelings now. Y’know how it is, I don’t make the rules, yadda yadda yadda.”

“Open the door, Stark.”

“No can do, bowman. You wanna tell me what’s got your parties in a bunch?”

“Not particularly.”

“Ok. We’ll just hang out here then until the rest of the team comes looking for us, and then we can talk about it all in front of them.”

“Some team,” Clint spits. He starts crossing the room, intent on the secondary set of doors. Also locked. It takes every ounce of self control he has not to punch the wall.

Weirdly enough, Stark is sticking to his word. He stands quietly, tapping at something on his watch but clearly waiting. 

“This is bullshit,” Clint announces. Tony doesn’t even look up. 

“I mean, I’m inclined to agree, but when Romanoff tells you you’re going to do something you do it. If you wanna intervene I won’t stop you but it’s your, uh, your problem. Sorry, Legolas. Though she might not castrate you, I mean you guys used to be -“

Clint gives in and punches the wall. His knuckles split instantly and leave a smear of blood on the brushed steel, but at least it gets Stark to shut up. 

“I came here because Natasha asked,” he says lowly. “I did not come here for some screwed up superhero version of therapy. If you’re not going to unlock the doors then you can keep explaining this time travel thing, but I’m not going to talk about my  _ feelings _ .”

There’s a long moment of silence. Stark is staring at him, eyes narrowed, but finally gives a sharp nod and pulls up some kind of hologram chart on his watch. “Right. So like I was saying…”

-=-

Clint thought that was the end of it. He was wrong. 

-=-

He’s waylaid again in the hall, on his way to meet with Stark to test something else with the suit. One minute he’s walking alone, and the next Steve friggin Rogers appears out of nowhere to fall in beside him. 

“Cap,” he says, trying to act like his heart isn’t trying to jump out of his throat. He thinks he does ok, but damn, for a super soldier the man is  _ quiet. _

“Barton,” Rogers acknowledges. Then...hesitates. 

_ Dammit. _

“I don’t think I ever properly thanked you for -“

Clint holds up a hand before the man can really get going. Rogers has an unfortunate tendency towards speechifying when he’s nervous. “Give it a rest, Cap. It’s a non-issue.”

“Tony said that you changed your name.”

Clint clenches his jaw and breathes deep. When he goes too long without responding Rogers speaks up again. “I tried talking to Natasha, but she said I should talk to you.”

“Well you’ve talked to me, we good now?”

He hopes they are. He really doesn’t want to have this conversation, not ever, but especially not now, and  _ definitely  _ not with Captain “Do It For the Greater Good” America. 

“Clint.”

He takes another breath, digs his toes into the floor, and stops. 

“Cap,” he says, as levelly as he can, “with all due respect, it is none of your futzing business.”

He leaves Captain America standing in an empty hallway, looking like he’s maybe starting to feel as frustrated as Clint already does. And damn, it feels just a little bit good.

-=-

The meetings that follow are a relief in that no one else tries to bring up his feelings. No one else calls him Hawkeye either, and he’s not sure if it’s because they’re all feeling less than super-heroic now or if Tony spread the word, but as long as no one brings it up he’s fine. 

He’s  _ fine. _

He’s starting to have nightmares about Japan, about Athens, about Bolivia, but he’s  _ fine _ . It’s nothing he hasn’t handled before. 

It’s when he dreams of Laura, out in the barn with hay in her hair, that he wakes up crying with Natasha standing over him. 

_ “Tasha,”  _ he gasps, like a drowning man, like a dying one. He fumbles blindly across the sheets and she grabs his hand and squeezes tight. “They’re gone, they’re all gone...what am I supposed to do?”

She doesn’t answer. He wonders if it’s because she knows, or because she doesn’t. 

-=-

It isn’t until they’re suiting up that it gets brought up again. 

“We’re going into the field,” Cap says. “It’s been awhile, but we’re going to need to use field names again.”

“Nice and official,” Tony says. His tone says  _ I’m-a-douchebag-please-punch-me _ , but his expression says  _ terror.  _

Clint can relate.

“Clint,” Cap says, and here it comes. Clint braces himself. “I know you’re not using...that name, anymore. What should we call you?”

He finds he doesn’t even have to think about it, now. “Clint,” he says. “Just Clint.”

“No more Hawkeye?”

“No more Hawkeye,” he confirms. “No more Avengers, either, if you think about it. Not really. Look, I’m not out to avenge anyone. I’m done with that. I just want to get things back to how they were.”

Natasha waits until everyone is talking amongst themselves to grab his hand and squeeze. He squeezes back, grateful. 

It’s time. 


End file.
